Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In this 1995 book, Bersani begins with a stark statement: “No one wants to be called a homosexual.” He is not thinking, primarily, of closeted gay men or women, but the aversion to “homosexuality” on the part of self-identified homosexual activists and theorists. According to Bersani, queer theorists like Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner have taken “queer” to delineate political rather than erotic tendencies. In their writing, they have erased the specificity of gay identity in favor of transcendence over the homo-hetero binary, or of social constructivism or of historicizing the category; these theorists fear, rightly, to essentialize gay identity, a move that would fall in with heterosexist practice. Though he is opposed, like the other theorists, to essentialist definitions, Bersani wants to reinstate the specificity of gay identity—same-sex desire—because one needs to oppose heterosexism on behalf of something, from the position of somewhere, however compromised so...

No, I have lost in advance. I shall therefore voice my love. I now trust only in the beauty of my song (147). * I don't know much about Evil, but we must indeed have been angels to remain poised above our own crimes. The gravest insult among toughs--it is very often punished by death--is the word "cocksucker," and Bulkaen had chosen to be precisely what that vilest of words designates. He had even decided that it would be what was most personal, most precious in his life, since in prison he was first of all, before being a crasher, a pal, a "regular guy,"--and though he was all that--he was first of all "a guy who gives a blow-job." When you saw him, with his usual scowl of disgust, spit the words "little fag" at a jerk, you would never have thought that he himself was a chicken. Thus, there do exist fellows who voluntarily, and out of choice, are, in their heart of hearts, what is expressed by the most scurrilous insult, which they use to hu...

How to begin to describe a book that is reading me rather than the other way round? In every cell of Fontevrault prison, in its stone yards, in the stairwell where Genet and Bulkaen talk, and then exchange their intimate letters, constrained life speaks to constrained life, criminal activities—burglary, prostitution, murder—are haloed with an aura simultaneously piercing and muted, more piercing than martyred arrows and more muted than monkish holiness. In the intensity of Genet’s vision, the chain of a condemned child-killer flowers into a garland, Harcamone is transfigured into Christ. Harcamone dropped his arms, and the chain hung in front of him, below his belt. He walked out of the cell. As sunflowers turn to the sun, our faces turned and our bodies pivoted without our even realizing that our immobility had been disturbed, and when he moved toward us, with short steps, like the women of 1910 in hobble skirts, or the way he himself danced the Java, we felt a temptation to kneel or ...